HARRISON GRAY DYAR

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March 1, Friday: Harrison Gray Dyar was born in Harvard, Massachusetts, a son of Jeremiah and Susanna Wild Dyar (he would grow up in Concord).

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal:

6 day 1 of 3 M/ Last forth day evening, rode to Portsmouth to attend the M Meeting the next day. Lodged at the Chases— At the meeting I was brought under an exercise, apprehending it to be my duty to speak to Some matters before us, & was favored with streangth to do it beyond my expectation - but when I returned home in the evening was never sensible of feeling more nothingness of mind.

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THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

1805

RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

Harrison Gray Dyar “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

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A news item relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: The brothers Harrison Gray Dyar and Joseph Dyar became apprentices in the Concord clockmaking shop of Lemuel Curtis on the “Milldam”. According to Alfred Munroe’s CONCORD AND THE TELEGRAPH (published by the Concord Antiquarian Society), it would be Harrison Gray Dyar, not any Johnny-come-lately like the American portrait painter Samuel F.B. Morse, who in 1826 “erected the first real line and despatched the first message over it by electricity ever sent by such means in America,” over half a mile of wire alongside the “Causeway” or Lowell Road. This was even years prior to the 1837 joint English patent on electric telegraphy taken out by Sir William Cooke and Sir Charles Wheatstone (Munroe acknowledges that “This may seem strange to most of our readers, as the credit of this great discovery has been generally conceded to Prof. Morse”). According to Colonel William Whiting of Concord, this line had been hung from the trees along the “Causeway” or Lowell Road or Red Bridge or Hunt’s Bridge (over the Concord River at Gleason E6) road, using for insulators the glass phials of an apothecary, “all the way to Curtis’s.”1

The Dyar brothers would record the sparks on a ribbon of moistened litmus paper on a spool that revolved by clockwork. The nitric acid that was formed on the litmus paper by the action of the electricity left clearly legible little red marks on the blue litmus paper. His experiment would work well enough that he would be able to get some cash backing in New-York and run a line at the Long Island racetrack, and then propose to

1818

1. And ain’t that just great, the home of the brothers George William Curtis and James Burrill Curtis who helped Henry Thoreau raise the frame of his shanty on Walden Pond is not included on the Concord map. Did they reside, then, in some adjoining town?

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string a wire across New Jersey between New-York and Philadelphia. However, the New Jersey legislature would condemn him as “dangerous” and a “wizard,” and refuse permission for this larger experiment, and then one of his backers would threaten to take him to court to get his money back, and pretty soon it would be all over but the shouting. There is an argument that Samuel F.B. Morse got a lot of his plans for the electric telegraph in America from this Concord experimenter. For instance, Dyar used batteries, and had the idea of sending electric impulses along a wire, and had the idea of spacing the sparks in such a way as to form an alphabetic code, and developed such a code. We know also that the famous Morse would marry a sister of Charles Walker, and that Walker had worked with Dyar on this scheme and had retained many of Dyar’s sketches — so we may presume that either Walker or his sister might well have showed those sketches to Morse.2

“HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE” BEING A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN TIME (JUST AS THE PERSPECTIVE IN A PAINTING IS A VIEW

FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN SPACE), TO “LOOK AT THE COURSE OF HISTORY MORE GENERALLY” WOULD BE TO SACRIFICE PERSPECTIVE ALTOGETHER. THIS IS FANTASY-LAND, YOU’RE FOOLING YOURSELF. THERE CANNOT BE ANY SUCH THINGIE, AS SUCH A PERSPECTIVE.

2. It has also been established that Morse knew others besides Walker who had worked with Dyer. Is this not much too much of a coincidence? In the case of the electric telegraph, it is now clear that funding and organization and social anthropology were more important ingredients of such a success than any of the credited technological tinkering — for a whole lot of people had been developing these technological capabilities without possessing Morse’s political and social connections and without attaining the public and private funding and societal legitimation that would get them anywhere.

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According to Marcel R. Garnier’s L’ANCÊTRE (THE ANCESTOR), it was in about this year that John Guillet went from the Isle of Jersey to Québec in the New World.

Harrison Gray Dyar reached his majority and completed his apprenticeship at the Concord clockmaking shop of Lemuel Curtis on the “Milldam”.

Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau joined the Concord Female Charitable Society. One of the many things this society had done for the local “silent poor” was provide snuff, rice, tea, brandy, and spirits to Zilpah White while she had lived (she had died in 1820) “at the very corner of my bean field” near Walden Pond alone in a cabin, and provide yarn that she could weave so as to have some sort of cash income.

YOUR GARDEN-VARIETY ACADEMIC HISTORIAN INVITES YOU TO CLIMB ABOARD A HOVERING TIME MACHINE TO SKIM IN METATIME BACK

ACROSS THE GEOLOGY OF OUR PAST TIMESLICES, WHILE OFFERING UP A GARDEN VARIETY OF COGENT ASSESSMENTS OF OUR PROGRESSION. WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP! YOU SHOULD REFUSE THIS HELICOPTERISH

OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORICAL PAST, FOR IN THE REAL WORLD THINGS HAPPEN ONLY AS THEY HAPPEN. WHAT THIS SORT WRITES AMOUNTS,

LIKE MERE “SCIENCE FICTION,” MERELY TO “HISTORY FICTION”: IT’S NOT WORTH YOUR ATTENTION.

1825

PEOPLE OFWALDEN

WALDEN: Here, by the very corner of my field, still nearerto town, Zilpha, a colored woman, held her little house, whereshe spun linen for townsfolk, making the Walden Woods ring withher shrill singing, for she had a loud and notable voice.At length, in the war of 1812, her dwelling was set on fire byEnglish soldiers, prisoners on parole, when she was away, and hercat and dog and hens were all burned up together. She led a hardlife, and somewhat inhumane. One old frequenter of these woodsremembers, that as he passed her house one noon he heard hermuttering to herself over her gurgling pot, –“Ye are all bones,bones!” I have seen bricks amid the oak copse there.

ZILPAH WHITE

SLAVERY

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Concord’s Orthodox meeting-house was constructed, making it much more convenient to “get it” in Concord:

July 20, 1859: … P. M.–To Eddy Bridge.Abel Hosmer says that the Turnpike Company did not fulfill their engagement to build a new bridge over theAssabet in 1807; that the present stone bridge was not built till about the time the Orthodox meeting-house wasbuilt. (That was in 1826.) Benjamin says it was built soon after the meeting-house, or perhaps 1827, and wasplaced some fifty feet higher up-stream than the old wooden one.

According to Alfred Munroe’s CONCORD AND THE TELEGRAPH (22 pages, read before the Concord Antiquarian Society on January 6, 1902), in this year Harrison Gray Dyar of Concord preceded the portrait painter Samuel F.B. Morse by many, many years in the invention of the electric telegraph in America, in that allegedly he and his brother Joseph strung a bare iron wire from tree to tree a half-mile along the “Causeway” in Concord, Massachusetts (this would later be called Lowell Road, and Red Bridge Road). According to Colonel William Whiting of Concord, they strung the wire over the Concord River at Hunt’s Bridge all the way to the Curtis residence. They employed apothecary vials as glass insulators.

The sparks generated by the electrical current were recorded at the destination on a spool of moistened litmus paper that was being revolved mechanically by a clockwork apparatus. Sparks left red marks on the litmus paper, marks that could be interpreted to indicate letters of the alphabet.

A monument to the memory of the Reverend William Emerson was erected in Concord.

The Rev. WILLIAM EMERSON, son of the Rev. Joseph Emerson, of Malden,was born May 21, 1743, and graduated at Harvard College in 1761.His father was the son of Edward Emerson of Chelmsford, andgrandson of the Rev. Joseph Emerson of Mendon, who married adaughter of the Rev. Edward Bulkeley, and died in Concord,January 3, 1680. His mother was a daughter of the Rev. Samuel

1826

CONCORD

ZOOMMAP

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Moody of York. The Rev. Joseph Emerson of Pepperell, and JohnEmerson of Conway, were his brothers. The Rev. William Emersonwas pastor of the church in Concord about ten years. His ardentlove for his country, as a “high son of liberty,” prevailed onhim to contribute, by his intellectual and personal services athome and abroad, in the great conflict of the AmericanRevolution. On the 16th of August, 1776, he left his people withtheir consent, his church, his friends and all the endearmentsof domestic life, to join the army at Ticonderoga as chaplain.He continued in office till advised by his physicians to resignon account of ill health, and was discharged by General Gates,September 18. He commenced his return home, but, his diseaseincreasing, he could not proceed. He stopped at the Rev. BenajahRoot’s, of Rutland, on Otter Creek, where he remained sufferingunder a severe bilious fever, till his death, which took placeat 5 o’clock on Sunday morning, October 20, at the age of 33.He was interred there with the honors of war by a detachmentfrom Colonel Vandyke’s regiment, commanded by Major Shepard. Hislast sickness was borne with great composure, resignation, andChristian fortitude. He often spoke of the endearing kindnessof his people toward him, and the pleasure he should enjoy, ifit were the will of God, to give him opportunity to show hisgratitude by exerting himself more vigorously for their good.When the hour of dissolution seemed to be near, he appeared likeone waiting “to depart and be with Christ.” The regret, apparentin all existing records, that he should be prematurely cut offin his promising career of usefulness, evinces the esteem of thesociety of which he was pastor. Mr. Emerson’s personalappearance was pleasing and prepossessing; his manners familiarand gentlemanly; his conversation communicative and facetious,though not inconsistent with his ministerial character; in hispreaching he was popular, eloquent, persuasive, and devotional,adapting himself, with remarkable ease, to all circumstance andoccasions; and his doctrine was evangelical. “Fervency ofspirit,” ardent zeal, love of his profession and his people,characterized all his performances. A monument was erected bythe town to his memory in 1826, on which his character isdelineated as “enthusiastic, eloquent, affectionate, and pious;he loved his family, his people, his God, and his country. Andto this last he yielded the cheerful sacrifice of his life.”Mr. Emerson married Phebe, daughter of the Rev. Daniel Bliss,August 21, 1766, by whom he had William (noticed among thecollege graduates), Hannah Bliss, Phebe, Mary Moody, andRebecca. His widow married the Rev. Ezra Ripley, November 16,1780, and died, February 16, 1825, aged 83, having had by himtwo sons and a daughter.3

The town bell that Concord had procured from England in 1789 was replaced in this year by another one, weighing 1,572 pounds.

In 1667, a new meeting-house was ordered to be built, to standbetween the present house and Deacon Jarvis’s. It was nearly

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square and had a gallery. The lower floor had a few pews on theout side; and the remainder was filled with seats. The roof wassquare and ornamented with four projections on the sides,resembling luthern windows or gable ends, having a window ineach. In the centre was a “turret,” or cupola, in which the bellwas hung. On the spire was a vane in which was cut “1673,” thedate of the completion of the house.Arrangements were made in 1710, after several meeting andconsiderable discussion, for building another house. It was 60feet long, 50 wide, and 28 “stud”; had no pews till some timeafter it was built, and then only by special vote of the town,as a favor to distinguished individuals; two galleries; noporches nor turret; and was completed in 1712 at an expense of£608. This house was several times repaired. In 1749 pews werebuilt around the lower floor, and some in the lower gallery.January 31, 1791, the town voted to enlarge and repair the housein its present [1835] form. It is 72 feet long, 50 wide, and 28high; and has three porches, a spire 90 feet high, and squarepews on the lower floor, and by the walls in the gallery.Builders, Abner Wheeler and Reuben Bryant; expense, £924. It wasdedicated January 24, 1792, when the Rev. Dr. Ripley preached asermon, which was printed.4

THE TASK OF THE HISTORIAN IS TO CREATE HINDSIGHT WHILE INTERCEPTING ANY ILLUSION OF FORESIGHT. NOTHING A HUMAN CAN

SEE CAN EVER BE SEEN AS IF THROUGH THE EYE OF GOD.

3. The Rev. Ralph Waldo Emerson of Boston kindly loaned me a concise private journal kept by his grandfather, from January, 1775 to August, 1776; and several letters to his wife written at Cambridge and at the Northward; which, beside detailing some important historical facts, are remarkable for their easy, sprightly style. The Rev. Mr. Roots addressed a letter to the church, giving an account of his last sickness. A notice of his character appeared in the Boston Gazette, November 4, 1776.Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Company;

Concord MA: John Stacy(On or about November 11, 1837 Henry Thoreau would indicate a familiarity

with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6-9 of this historical study. On July 16, 1859 he would correct a date mistakeburied in the body of the text.)

4. Ibid.

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Harrison Gray Dyar erected an experimental telegraph wire at a Paumanok Long Island racetrack. He proposed to string a wire between New-York and Philadelphia, across New Jersey, and ran into skepticism from members of the New Jersey legislature who feared Dyar as some sort of “wizard” of deception like the figure that would later appear in the “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” story by L. Frank Baum. They feared that behind this project there might be some sort of dangerous agenda to send secret communications in advance of the mail.

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”

When one of Dyar’s financial backers threatened to accuse him of “conspiracy to send secret communications in advance of the mail” as part of an attempt to get his money back, Dyar fled the country. For many years he would live in Paris where, apparently, he was able to make good money as a chemist.

For the next two or three years William Apess would be an itinerant Methodist exhorter on Paumanok Long Island, in the valley of the Hudson River, on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket Island, and in the cities of Boston and New Bedford. Much of the work he would be doing, of course, since he was not a white man, would need to be with mixed groups of African-Americans and native Americans.In this timeframe, on Nantucket Island, Friend Maria Mitchell would have been attending Cyrus Peirce’s School for Young Ladies. (Other than that, and her own self-education, she was mainly being educated by her father, whom she assisted in the checking of chronometers for the local whaling fleet.)

ESSENCES ARE FUZZY, GENERIC, CONCEPTUAL;ARISTOTLE WAS RIGHT WHEN HE INSISTED THAT ALL TRUTH IS

SPECIFIC AND PARTICULAR (AND WRONG WHEN HE CHARACTERIZED TRUTH AS A GENERALIZATION).

1827

Harrison Gray Dyar “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

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A news item relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: Creation of a book, FOREIGN CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE LIBERTIES OF THE UNITED STATES (New-York: Leavitt, Lord & Company), out of a series of articles which had been published in a weekly periodical, New-York Observer. The book is a Know-Nothing treatise against the political influence of Catholicism in which the author announced the discovery of an internationalist Catholic conspiracy: “its plans are already in operation … we are attacked in a vulnerable quarter which cannot be defended by our ships, or forts, or our armies.” The

publisher of the weekly periodical was the author’s brother. The author was the son of the Congregationalist

minister of Boston, the Reverend Jedediah Morse, the divine who had in May 1798 warned of an internationalistic atheistic conspiracy he termed “the Illuminati.” This demagogue’s name was Samuel F.B. Morse, and you will remember him not only as the person who laid claims to unique insight which led to his detection of an internationalist Catholic conspiracy but also as the person who laid claims to the unique insights which led to the “invention” of the electric telegraph. (In the case of the electric telegraph, it is now clear that funding and organization and social anthropology were more important ingredients of such a success than any of his technological tinkering — for a whole lot of people had been developing these technological capabilities without possessing his good connections and without attaining the funding and legitimation that would get them anywhere.) The source of the present danger, Morse fils announced, was Jesuits operating out of a base within the Austrian government.5 And it was in this very year that Morse constructed the first working model of the telegraph upon the frame of an old picture from his painting studio:

1835

5. During this year also there appeared a book, PLEA FOR THE WEST (Cincinnati: Truman & Smith; New-York: Leavitt, Lord & Company), alleging that the USA was presently the site for an immense life-or-death struggle, of Protestants vs. Catholics. “Whatever we [Protestants] do, it must be done quickly.…” One of the things we could do quickly would be to call a halt to the immigrant stream of people who were “inexperienced” in our way of life, unaccustomed to the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness as it is enacted in these great and United States of America. The author of this paranoid masterpiece was the Reverend Lyman Beecher, the father of, among others, Harriet Beecher Stowe. (She didn’t get her divisiveness –her ability to create an enemy who must be utterly destroyed whereupon we will all be purified– from out of the blue sky, you know.)The most recent such piece of shit I have discovered is by the clown who wrote the book upon which the Bertolucci movie “The Last Emperor” was based. Take a look at the Japan-bashing in that book! He claims that before the 2d World War, the Sun Emperor was positioning a group of a dozen or so diplomatic conspirators in Switzerland to run the world. –Which is not to say that the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere wouldn’t have wanted to take over the world and run it for the benefit of all, it is merely to say that what keeps any one group of us who believe they could fruitfully take over the world and run it from taking over the world and running it is the existence of a whole bunch of other groups of us who believe they could fruitfully take over the world and run it, and is merely to say, also, that we’re damned lucky that that’s so.

ELECTRICWALDEN

ANTI-CATHOLICISM

SURVEY OF AMERICAN ANTI-CATHOLICISM

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The Johannes Gutenberg age of print, then, perhaps stretchesfrom roughly 1448 and the printing of the “Forty-Two Line Bible”to approximately 1835.

— Docherty, Thomas. ON MODERN AUTHORITY: THE THEORY AND CONDITION OF WRITING INTO THE PRESENT

DAY. NY: St. Martin’s P, 1987, page 284

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There is an argument that Morse got a lot of his plans for the electric telegraph in America from Harrison Gray Dyar of Concord. Dyar was an inventor, and had batteries, and he had the idea of sending electric impulses along a wire and he had the idea of spacing the sparks in such a way as to form an alphabetic code. Using glass apothecary phials as insulators, he strung a wire from tree to tree alongside the Red Bridge road (Hunt’s Bridge on the Lowell Road over the Concord River at Gleason E6) “all the way to Curtis’s.”6

HISTORY OF THE PRESS

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He recorded the sparks on a ribbon of moistened litmus paper on a spool that revolved by clockwork. The nitric acid that was formed on the litmus paper by the action of the electricity left little red marks on the blue litmus paper. His experiment worked well enough that he got some cash backing and proposed to string a wire from New-York to Philadelphia. However, the New Jersey legislature called him “dangerous,” and refused permission for this larger experiment, and then one of his backers threatened to take him to court to get his money back. We know that Samuel F.B. Morse married the sister of Charles Walker, and we know that Charles Walker worked with Dyar on this scheme and retained many of Dyar’s sketches, so we may presume that Walker or his sister showed the sketches to Morse. We have also established that Morse knew a number of other people, besides Charles Walker, who had worked with Dyar. Is this not much too much of a coincidence?

ESSENCE IS BLUR. SPECIFICITY, THE OPPOSITE OF ESSENCE,

IS OF THE NATURE OF TRUTH.

6. And ain’t that just great, the brothers George William Curtis and James Burrill Curtis who helped Henry Thoreau raise the frame of his shanty on Walden Pond are not shown on the Concord map. Did they live in some adjoining town?

HISTORY OF TELEGRAPHY

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The “single-needle” electrical telegraph patented by William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone had been capable of an average of but 25 characters per minute. In this year the 1st system remarkably faster than this, the Wheatstone Automatic Telegraph, began to produce throughputs of up to 2,000 characters per second by use of punched paper-tape readers (16 baud?). Also, during this year, the 1st transatlantic cable was being laid, on the ocean floor between Ireland and Newfoundland.

Having amassed a small fortune from working with chemical dyes, Harrison Gray Dyar returned from Paris to America, settling in New-York. There would be no more talk of his having pioneered the electric telegraph in Concord in 1826 or on Paumanok Long Island in 1827.

Rowland Hussey Macy (1822-1919) had gotten started in retail in 1851 with a dry goods store in downtown Haverhill. Macy’s policy from the very first had been “His goods are bought for cash, and will be sold for the same, at a small advance.” In this year Macy sold his store in Haverhill and, with the financial backing of Caleb Dustin Hunking, relocated his retail business to easier pickings in New-York (Manhattan would prove to be most receptive to his tradition of an annual parade).

Construction began on St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New-York, at an estimated total cost of $5,850.40.

Brooklyn’s St. Francis College was founded in New-York.

High Bridge over the Harlem River in New-York lost its charter as a toll bridge.

The art collection of Luman Reed was given to the New-York Historical Society.

Edward R. Squibb started a pharmaceutical firm in Brooklyn, New-York.

Matthew Brady opened studios in New-York and in Washington DC.

1858

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Mrs. Marshall O. Roberts started a Ladies’ Christian Association prayer group in New-York, that is now considered as the first US Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA).

In New-York, William B. Astor enlarged the Astor Library.

Since its inception five years earlier the Children’s Aid Society of New-York had provided homes for 3,576 boys and girls.

The first steel-nibbed pens went on sale, in New-York.

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

Harrison Gray Dyar “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

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May 9, Tuesday: President Andrew Johnson issued an Executive Order taking federal control over Virginia and cautioning that any person continuing to attempt to exercise any political, military, or civil power, authority, jurisdiction, or right by, through, or under Jefferson Davis, late of the city of Richmond, and his confederates, or under John Letcher or William Smith and their confederates, or under any pretended political, military, or civil commission or authority issued by them or either of them since the 17th day of April, 1861, would be deemed and taken as in rebellion against the United States and dealt with accordingly (by the way, it might be good for your health to take an oath of allegiance).7

Harrison Gray Dyar got married.

In Deerfield, New York, a group was sitting around the stove of the Pratt & Owens store engaged in pleasant conversation, when at about 9:30PM Mr. Milton Pratt got up and went into the rear office. Mr. Owens heard some unusual sound and followed just in time to catch him as he fell. He had slashed his throat horribly with a razor. “No reason is known for the act.”

NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE

1865

7. I was reading about a speech President Obama recently made, in which he referred to the United States of America as a plural rather than singular noun. The commentator alleged that the president had misspoke, but I remembered Thoreau writing in WALDEN, “It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate power.” Did Thoreau commit the same boo-boo then that the president has now? Oh, tookie tookie!To get a definitive factoid, I turned to Google's “ngram” service (you can yourself try it). Plugging in the search phrase “United States is, United States are”, it turns out that linguistic drift from usage of “United States of America” as a plural noun to usage as a singular noun has been remarkably slow and steady. There has been no particular period of great change in our usage. There has merely been instead, a slow steady gradual drift from the plural usage, toward the singular.This is interesting because our professional historians are forever informing us that the Civil War was some sort of fulcrum point, at which the Federal Government made of itself a singularity rather than a plurality. No, what the ngram search reveals is that the Civil War was not such a fulcrum point. No, there was not any such great leap in usage associated with the years 1860 to 1865. The chart is marked only in its graduality. You cannot discover in this ngram chart when the Civil War occurred, or when the federal government suddenly became an overwhelming force swamping the individual state governments. Our historians have been making this stuff up out of whole cloth.

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February 14, Wednesday: Harrison Gray Dyar, Jr. was born in New-York.

The San Francisco, California Dramatic Chronicle explained, on its page 2, the origin of the name “Mark Twain”:

A Washoe genius yesterday explained to us the origin of the nomde plume “Mark Twain.” “Wall now, d’ye see,” said our informant,“‘Mark’ — that is Sam, d’ye see — used to take his regular drinksat Johnny Doyle’s. Well, ‘Mark,’ that is Sam, d’ye see, used torun his face, bein’ often short of legal tenders. Well, ‘Mark,’that is Sam, d’ye understand, always used to take two hornsconsecutive, one right after the other, and when he come in thereand took ’em on tick, Johnny used to sing out to his barkeep,who carried a lump of chalk in his weskit pocket and kept thescore, ‘mark twain,’ whereupon the barkeep would score twodrinks to Sam’s account — and so it was, d’ye see, that he cometo be called ‘Mark Twain.’”

NEVER READ AHEAD! TO APPRECIATE FEBRUARY 14TH, 1866 AT ALL ONE MUST APPRECIATE IT AS A TODAY (THE FOLLOWING DAY,

TOMORROW, IS BUT A PORTION OF THE UNREALIZED FUTURE AND IFFY AT BEST).

1866

Harrison Gray Dyar “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

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January 31, Sunday: Harrison Gray Dyar died, leaving a considerable estate due to patents on chemical dyes.

This being the Sunday after the burial of Charles Kingsley in Eversley, Hampshire where he had been curate, a sermon was preached in Westminster Abbey. On the tombstone would be inscribed the words AMAVIMUS, AMAMUS, AMABIMUS. A bust of him by Thomas Woolner would be placed in the Poets’ Corner. A LIFE OF CHARLES KINGSLEY would be written by the widow, Frances E. Kingsley.

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD?— NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES.

LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

1875

Harrison Gray Dyar “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

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A news item relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology:

• Ramon Verea, living in New-York, invented a calculator with an internal multiplication table; this was much faster than the shifting carriage or other digital methods. He wasn’t interested in putting it into production; he merely needed to demonstrate that a Spaniard could invent just as well as an American.

• The Remington typewriter “Model 2” was able to print lower-case as well as upper-case letters. To avoid increasing the number of keys, the two type faces were on the same typebar and the letter key was operated in combination with a platen-shifting mechanism.

• According to a clipping preserved from an unidentified newspaper it would seem that in this year Alfred Munroe initially published his claim that Harrison Gray Dyar had preceded the portrait painter Samuel F.B. Morse by many, many years in the invention of the electric telegraph in America — and that the first test of this new apparatus had been conducted in 1826 along a road in Concord, Massachusetts (this news hadn’t come to the attention of 9-year-old local schoolboy David Henry Thoreau as of 1826, hadn’t come to the attention of Morse as of 1837, and as of 1878 hadn’t come to the attention of local historian Edward Jarvis and is not to be found in his TRADITIONS AND REMINISCENCES OF CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS 1779-1878).

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

•

1878

ELECTRICWALDEN

Harrison Gray Dyar “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

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July: In response to high wartime prices wheat farmers had turned the sod of millions of acres of grassland across the homesteaded plains of what would become America’s Dust Bowl. US yields for the 1st time topped 1,000,000,000 bushels of wheat, despite $100,000,000 damage by newly arrived Hessian flies.

In the course of a vacation in the mosquito-free mountains of Virginia, wealthy unhappily married National Museum entomologist Harrison Gray Dyar, Jr., a specialist in the family Culicidae, became intrigued with a rather unattractive middleaged spinster kindergarten schoolteacher of Washington DC, Miss Wellesca “Aseyeh” Pollock. He would name a newly discovered moth species in her honor — Parasa wellesca:

In Turkey, Behaeddin Shakir, chief of the Special Organization of Erzerum Province, sent a telegram to Nazim

1915

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Bey Resneli via Sabit Bey, governor-general of Kharput Province, desiring to be informed whether the Armenians he was deporting were being exterminated or merely convoyed.

Behaeddin Shakir ordered the governor-general of Kastamonu Province to begin deportation of the Armenians there.

Talaat informed the Ittihad party organization in Malatia that half the loot taken from Armenian families was reserved to the Central Committee of Ittihad in Constantinople, with only the other half distributed to chetes. (On December 12, 1918 the newspaper Sabah would report that each chete in the Malatia area had received 15,000 Turkish pounds.)

Governor-general Reshid Pasha reported to the Interior Ministry that deportation of Armenians from Kastamonu Province had been completed.

Behaeddin Shakir sent a cipher telegram to the governor-general of Adalia Province, Sabur Sami Bey, asking him what steps he was taking at a time, when in Erzerum, Van, Bitlis, Diyarbekir, Sivas, and Trebizond Provinces, not a single Armenian remained because they have all been sent in the direction of Mosul and Der-el-Zor (Deir el-Zor). Sabur sent a copy of the telegram to Talaat to show that he had received these indirect instructions.

The vice-governor of Yozgat District, in Angora Province, reported to the Interior Ministry that 68,000 Armenians had been slain there.

Sabit, the governor-general of Kharput Province, informed the Interior Ministry that the roads were filled with the bodies of women and children but time could not be found to bury them.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

Harrison Gray Dyar “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

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September 25, Friday: It was reported in Washington DC that a truck had fallen through the street near 21st and P streets NW, revealing an elaborate, multilevel tunnel. “Old Tunnel Here Believed to Have Been Used by Teuton War Spies and Bootleggers,” read a headline in The Washington Post. In addition to the tunnel at 1512 21st Street NW, there would turn out to be another such excavation beneath the red brick house and side yard at 804 B Street SW across from the National Museum. This one was 24 feet deep. The tunnels were faced in brick, with a brick arch above, had electric lighting, and were tall enough to stand in and wide enough for people to pass abreast. Some shafts that went straight down were lined in concrete, with horizontal iron pipes arranged as ladder rungs. One arch was inscribed with a motto from Virgil: FACILIS DESCENSUS AVERNO, “The way down to the lower world is easy.” The tunneler turned out to be the Smithsonian entomologist Harrison Gray Dyar, Jr., an expert on mosquitoes. He at first claimed that he did it for exercise. He insisted that there had never been anything secret about his tunnels, that in fact his son Otis Dyar had played in them with neighborhood boys. He had been going at this project for a decade, dumping the dirt in a vacant lot nearby and facing the walls in brick. Dyar had left the tunnels behind when he moved from the house around 1914 to live out west for a few years, but then had returned to Washington. He had begun to tunnel at one house as a way of getting from the basement to the ash can on the street without needing to walk outside. At the other house the tunneling had begun as a simple gardening project. In 1905 or 1906 his wife Zella Dyar had decided that she wanted a vegetable garden and a bed of hollyhocks in the yard behind the Dyar house at 1512 21st St. NW. “You know the hollyhock grows best if the earth under it for many feet is loosened,” Dyar would tell the reporter. “The roots of the hollyhock penetrate very deep into the ground. Well, I volunteered to dig the garden. When I was down perhaps six or seven feet, surrounded only by the damp brown walls of old Mother Earth, I was seized with an undeniable fancy to keep on going.” He had dug deep on B Street, stopping only when he had arrived at the water table.

1925

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THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

Harrison Gray Dyar “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

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January 21, Monday: Harrison Gray Dyar, Jr. died.

Horace Dodge, a millionaire from Detroit, had gotten into a fistfight with Harry Kastan, doorman of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and had then gotten him fired. On this day the former doorman filed a lawsuit for damages and penalties totaling $25,000.

FIGURING OUT WHAT AMOUNTS TO A “HISTORICAL CONTEXT” IS WHAT THE CRAFT OF HISTORICIZING AMOUNTS TO, AND THIS NECESSITATES

DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN THE SET OF EVENTS THAT MUST HAVE TAKEN PLACE BEFORE EVENT E COULD BECOME POSSIBLE, AND MOST

CAREFULLY DISTINGUISHING THEM FROM ANOTHER SET OF EVENTS THAT COULD NOT POSSIBLY OCCUR UNTIL SUBSEQUENT TO EVENT E.

1929

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others,such as extensive quotations and reproductions ofimages, this “read-only” computer file contains a greatdeal of special work product of Austin Meredith,copyright 2016. Access to these interim materials willeventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup someof the costs of preparation. My hypercontext buttoninvention which, instead of creating a hypertext leapthrough hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems—allows for an utter alteration of the context withinwhich one is experiencing a specific content alreadybeing viewed, is claimed as proprietary to AustinMeredith — and therefore freely available for use byall. Limited permission to copy such files, or anymaterial from such files, must be obtained in advancein writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Pleasecontact the project at <Kouroo@kouroo.info>.

Prepared: February 19, 2016

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over untiltomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”

– Remark by character “Garin Stevens”in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by ahuman. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested thatwe pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of theshoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What thesechronological lists are: they are research reports compiled byARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term theKouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such arequest for information we merely push a button.

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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obviousdeficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored inthe contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then weneed to punch that button again and recompile the chronology —but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary“writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of thisoriginating contexture improve, and as the programming improves,and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whateverhas been needed in the creation of this facility, the entireoperation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminishedneed to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expectto achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring roboticresearch librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge.Place requests with <Kouroo@kouroo.info>. Arrgh.